The Podcast, Freedom Socks, has released an interview with Matt Lee, FSF campaigns manager, on the subject of the Stephen Fry video.
It's interesting, the hosts put some interesting questions to him about the video.

pyalot writes: "The swiss goverment has passed a law that would make it impossible to cirvumvent effective copy protection measures. I have created a page to inform and organize a resistance against this law. If we collect 50'000 signatures until the 24th of January however, we can force a national vote on this law. Help me in any way that you can fight this law. I was first made aware of this two days ago by this article on slashdot."

Ajehals writes: "BBC Worldwide (a commercial, but wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC), ITV and Channel 4 plan to launch a joint web based TV on-demand service, which will bring together programming from the three major UK terrestrial broadcasters in one place. There is no indication at this point as to whether the service will be cross platform, or what kind, if any DRM solution will be in place to 'protect' content but it has been noted that this service will not replace the current offerings from any of the companies involved. If the service is tied to Microsoft's Windows Operating system it is likely to face opposition from groups currently opposed to certain elements of the planned BBC iPlayer ."

AnotherDaveB writes: The story of the BBC's iPlayer is of a multi-million pound failure that took years to complete, and was designed for a world that never arrived. More was spent on the project than many Silicon Valley startups ever burn through, but only now can we begin to piece together how this disaster unfolded.

mako writes: "The Free Software Foundation has released the Affero General Public license version 3. The license is essentially the GPLv3 with an added clause that requires that source code be distributed to users that interact with the application over a network. The license effectively extends copyright to web applications. The new AGPL will have important effects for companies that, under the GPL, have no obligation to distribute changes to users on the web. This release makes adds the license to the stable of official FSF licenses and is compatible with the GPLv3."

Virgil Tibbs writes: "The UK government is prepared to legislate to stop the illegal file sharing of copyrighted content, a minister has told the BBC.
Speaking to [BBC] Radio 4, Labour Politician Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said that the [British] government was not prepared to tolerate "intellectual property theft".
When pressed on how file sharing might be tackled, Triesman insisted that the technology existed to locate and track file sharers, and to oblige ISPs to stop them.
"Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net,"
In July the Conservative leader David Cameron made a speech in which he reasoned that, since ISPs were able to monitor their traffic for illegal material such as child pornography, there was no reason why they could not do the same for copyrighted material.
However Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) claims that ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their network."

Virgil Tibbs writes: "With a strange new twist, the DMCA is being used to combat coupon hacker, John StottlemireHe is alleged to have posted instructions that allowed shoppers to circumvent copy protection on downloadable, printable coupons and is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit from Coupons Inc.
However he claims he is not at odds with the DMCA:

"All I did was erase files or registry keys," he says. "Nothing was hacked. Nothing was decoded that was any way, shape or form in the way the DMCA was written."

Dragontologist writes: "In an interestingly round-about way, a few hackers have posted publicly about how to get around the $17/month fee for Netflix streaming video. It's not particularly easy, you only get 17 hours of video a month, and you can't copy it onto your iPod (not without another hack, anyway), but it's free (assuming you don't mind the whole illegal thing). All I want to know is, who would think to exploit Windows Media Player?"

Freedom Party writes: ""July 09, 2007 (Computerworld) — A federal appeals court has ruled that the government does not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's e-mail or Internet activity to determine the addresses of e-mails sent by the suspect or the Web pages he is visiting."
Another win for the War on Privacy. Yee-haw.:("

angus_rg writes: Sony BMG Music Entertainment is now claiming that their CD rootkit was defective, and is now suing the company that developed it. Apparently, this defect cost the record company millions of dollars for something they did not intend, and they feel $12,000,000 will ease the burn. Call me crazy, but it seemed like it worked the way it was intended.

A box (or group of boxes behind a proxy) at Oracle UK seems to have hit the top 10 of machines on the Internet for launching attacks on boxes which run SSH server software...

This would imply that not only has a computer (or multiple computers) at Oracle UK been compromised without them noticing, but the new owners have then spent the last 3 months using Oracle's bandwidth to hack other boxes elsewhere on the net.

Psy2k writes: "Here are some type combinations that will drive your Mint 2 installation to do weird things: Appear the Mintman (someone like Superman...) and show a really strange "approved" stamp! Of course these are not bugs, they are Easter Eggs, that Shaun himself put into Mint for fun. Here is a quote from the original article:

# Easter Egg 1: After you log in, type b a and look on your bottom right corner in your mint page!

# Easter Egg 2: If you want to see the Mintman, log in and type R L Y B

Tim Dobson (tdobson/virgil tibbs) is a Free Software activist from Glossop, UK.
In late 2007 he became a GNU Webmaster and has become actively involved in Manchester's Free Software community, helping shape the first Free Software Group in the UK.
He advocates cohesion in the community frequently
His life tends to revolve around the question; "What are the reasons not to?", Which occasionally leads him to do things such as large sailing projects.
Tim has been recognised for his sailing abilities in his local area, the high peak, and recently was awarded High Peak Young Sports Leader of the Year.
He has a website at http://www.tdobson.net where you can find out more about Tim.
For behind the scenes Blog and messing around take a look at http://www.blog.tdobson.net